Social Business: Why Group Adoption Matters

I often have one foot in academia and the other in the corporate world. I'm a (relatively old) doctoral student studying knowledge management. I also work as a community manager for a large company. In my work and through my studies, I've noticed that both academia and the corporate world tend to ignore what might be the key to success in social business adoption: the role of groups.

Take, for example, researchers in organizational behavior. They often work using three levels of analysis: individual, group, and organizational. But what does it mean when we say we are "promoting adoption" if each of these levels means something different? Is individual blogging considered adoption? Team collaboration? Executive buy-in? If everyone in the company is logging in but using the platform solely as a document repository or a social chat room, for example, is that adoption?

To get the real value that social business platforms offer, group adoption is critical. You can't ask a question of no one in particular and expect a quick, accurate answer unless the right people are already there for other reasons. But change management strategies for adoption are almost always presented as organizational or individual challenges, hardly ever with respect to teams, departments, or other groups. Why is that?

Mostly, I think, because it's hard. On the academic side, surveys are designed to collect information from individuals. A 2005 review of more than 50 e-collaboration research studies found that "researchers' frequent decisions to analyze data at the individual level -- even when the theory was formulated at the group level and when the research setting featured individuals working in groups -- may very well have artificially inflated the authors' chances of finding statistically significant results."

In other words, groups are constructs while individuals are, well, individuals. It's very easy to know who a person is, but teams can be fluid and porous. Even researchers, who should know better, have to fight the habit of thinking about groups as only collections of individuals.

On the business side, change efforts at the organizational and individual levels are easier because they're more scalable. Most recommendations for increasing adoption advocate changing the culture, gaining executive buy-in, training employees, seamless integration, and creating a simplified user interface. Benefits are usually framed as broad enterprise improvements in agility and innovation, or as individual responses to "WIIFM" -- what's in it for me?

We've applied many of these best practices in my own company, and they really do help. For example, our executives routinely mention our social platform in presentations as "the place to get more information." We have a large collection of online help files, and we've made several enhancements to make navigating and searching easier.

But often I hear comments like, "Wow, I really like our new social platform. I just wish I could get the other members of my team to use it." You could argue that the platform is necessary but not sufficient, which might be why so many promising social business initiatives fail. When the change message is directed at the whole organization and training is focused on individual behavior, adoption is often by a random assortment of employees rather than by cohesive units.

In a recent HBR podcast, Stanford University professor Bob Sutton observed that excellence does not spread evenly throughout the organization "like a thin layer of peanut butter." It incubates in pockets that spend time developing that excellence before it finds the next pocket.

So in 2014, I'm going to "level up" and focus on improving adoption in my organization by working at the group level with teams and departments. This means spending less time training individuals and more time with teams, focusing less on how and explaining more of why, encouraging teams that "get it" to work as transparently as their jobs will allow, so that others can see them as examples, and prioritizing and communicating new features based on their ability to enhance group performance.

All of this is harder and takes longer, because you have to understand each team in terms of why it exists and what it's trying to accomplish. But in the long run I think it will be worth it, because groups are what turn individuals into organizations.

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Dennis Pearce has over 30 years experience in manufacturing, product development, quality, IT, and knowledge management. He is currently Enterprise Knowledge Architect for Lexmark International, Inc., focusing on internal and external collaboration strategies and systems. View Full Bio

It seems to me that a lot of social business effort is being spent barking up the wrong tree. Many of our organizations have a century of well entrenched Taylorism behind them.

Their employees are paid and measured based upon individual work. As a result of this, and reinforced by their job descriptions, few have any incentive to collaborate or share knowledge.

Throw in that decisions are typically made based on hierarchy rather than knowledge, that information is often far from transparent and readily available throughout the organization and that feedback on both collective and individual performance is often incredibly sporadic.

Is it any surprise that enterprise social networks aren't taking off? Buying a tool won't make people collaborate when so many of the other things in their work environment are telling them not to.

These tools aren't difficult to pick up, and if you fix the environment so that it encourages collaborative behaviours then I'm fairly sure you'll get much better adoption of them.

@Tom, I agree with you on that point. To improve adoption, businesses need to focus on launching something simple and intuitive at the outset. If Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ were too complicated at the outset, people wouldn't have used it.

If training is required, the system is already too complicated. Facebook, Google+, and Twitter don't require training (though not everything is obvious at the outset). Collaboration platforms should need no explanation.

It's futile to try to change the collaboration habits of an entire organization in one fell swoop. It's too many people to get running in the same direction. It's difficult to do that in most departments let alone the entire company. Social tools only gain momentum in pockets, as the article mentions. When a small group uses social to improve communication and productivity, other groups will hear about it and want to try it, and then it snowballs. Group adoption matters as long as the groups are small.

At the individual level, never understimate the "what's in it for me?" factor. All the training and executive reminders and threats won't increase uptake long term unless individuals see and experience the value in using said collaboration platform. They must be a natural part of the workflow, not a forced march.

This is something my company has spent a considerable amount of time on, both developing, and testing methods for increasing the abysmal adoption success rates of collaboration software (around 10%). We're releasing our adoption toolkit soon (it's in final sanity checks at moment), but you're welcome to an early preview here: http://www.sideraworks.com/preview-collaboration-technology-adoption-toolkit/

In regards to individual, group, and org segmentation I don't think you can separate the three in a successful adoption initiative. There are many interdependent sociological factors between those three segments.

Cheers,

Matt RidingsCo-Founder and CEO, SideraWorksCreating Social Business Success Stories

The use of social media for a host of business purposes is rising. Indeed, social is quickly moving from cutting edge to business basic. Organizations that have so far ignored social - either because they thought it was a passing fad or just didnít have the resources to properly evaluate potential use cases and products - must start giving it serious consideration.

Social media is critical in the age of digital business. How can IT help? First, work with the marketing team to set up social networking programs on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, at minimum. Then work to put social media sentiment analytics in place to measure success.